Aftershocks of Disaster

In this gripping collection of essays, poems and photos, Aftershocks of Disaster captures both the roots of Puerto Rico's current crisis in its continuing colonial status and the determination of the island's people to persevere and forge a better future. -Juan Gonzalez, author of Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America, and co-host of Democracy Now! For those of us who were forced out of Puerto Rico and who watched the hurricane from outside, this book provides beautiful and painful clarity about how we got here and the struggles behind our survival. -Rossana Rodriguez Sanchez, Boricua Activist, artist and Chicago Council member Praise for Bonilla's Non-Soveriegn Futures: Non-Sovereign Futures wonderfully fulfills the vision articulated by Trouillot of what a Caribbeanist anthropology can accomplish. What we get here is at once a rich and powerful documentation of a particular political movement and, through that documentation, a set of approaches to thinking about broad and global questions about politics, ideology, and practice. -Laurent Dubois, author of Haiti Non-Sovereign Futures: French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment marks a significant intervention into debates about Caribbean pasts in the present. Focusing its historical and ethnographic lens on the 2009 labor upheaval in Guadeloupe, the book explores with methodological verve and seminal insight the paradoxical tension between the desire to resist continued dependence on France, and the difficulty of articulating a vocabulary that might embody the collective demand for an alternative mode of political self-determination. In short, the book aims to put into question whether sovereignty can continue to be imagined as the single normative good and ultimate value of modern political life. -David Scott, author of Omens of Adversity Praise for Lebron's Policing Life and Death In this extraordinary book, Marisol LeBron does a brilliant job helping us see the everyday activism and cultural inventiveness of Puerto Ricans figuring out how to respond to state repression and colonial capitalism. It's a genuinely thrilling read. -Laura Briggs, author of How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics: From Welfare Reform to Foreclosure to Trump Policing Life and Death deftly illuminates the long historical presence of 'punitive governance' in Puerto Rico, demonstrating the depth to which gendered racist state violence defines the US colonial/neocolonial relationship with the island and its people. This indispensable study not only focuses on the normalized, cross-generational violence generated by the policing and criminological regimes, but also pays rigorous attention to the ways Puerto Rican activists, artists, community leaders, and others respond to-and potentially transform-this punitive condition. -Dylan Rodriguez, author of Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the US Prison Regime LeBron's rigorously researched, trenchant examination into how everyday life is sectioned, monitored, and controlled is an essential read for understanding modern-day Puerto Rico and all communities and societies negotiating and defending themselves from the layered execution of power. -Zaire Dinzey-Flores, author of Locked In, Locked Out: Gated Communities in a Puerto Rican City